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Nicholas Gamso, "Art After Liberalism" (Columbia UP, 2022)
01:23:31
An interview with Nicholas Gamso
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- [00:00]
Pierre Lancer
Hello everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Poe
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast. Do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
- [01:00]
Nicholas Gamso
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- [01:16]
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- [01:45]
Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:58]
Pierre Lancer
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Pierre Delanse. Art love is a crisis. So much so that I have previously used this sentence as a pithy introduction to more than one of my programmes. Today I'll be speaking with my guest about Crisis 2. But this time the crisis in art may be a symptom of a much more severe the crisis of liberalism. Art After Liberalism by Nicholas Gamso is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts. The apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emerging ways of living, acting and making art in the company of others. What happens when the framework of the nation state the figure of the enterprising individual and the premise of limitless development can no longer be counted on to produce a world worth living in. It is increasingly clear that these commonplace liberal conceptions have failed to improve life and in any lasting way. In fact, they conceal fundamental connections to enslavement, colonization, moral debt, and ecological devastation. Nick's book reflects on how art may decide what comes after liberalism. This is a question that has been on my mind a lot lately, and I wish that more artists and critics took it to heart. My conversation with Nick, inspired by his book, which we hear now, moves between critique and speculation. This is a mode of engagement at the current moment, demands of us all. I'm very happy to say that Nicholas Gamsa joins me now. Nick, welcome to the show.
- [03:27]
Nicholas Gamso
Hi, thanks for having me.
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Pierre Lancer
Nick. We seem to be in a very post liberal moment, or at least this is a term that comes up day by day. But before we get into any of this, I'd like to learn a little bit about you.
- [03:40]
Nicholas Gamso
Yes, Well, I guess my background has always been interdisciplinary. My training, to the extent that I have training, was in a field called American Studies, which is a kind of interdisciplinary discourse. You know, there was the old American Studies, which was very interested in questions of inherency. What is the American novel? What is the American sensibility? And over the last 30 years, the discourse has really changed and is much more critical and attentive to some of the underlying systemic dimensions of American culture and politics. So the US's relationship to empire, as well as more, I suppose, questions drawn from political theory. What is the nation state? What's the relationship between colonial settlement and indigenous peoples and the North American continent? How did the history of enslavement realize or produce modern American culture? And so, as I say, it is a very interdisciplinary field and very concerned with the question of. Of liberalism, and kind of gave me a vocabulary, I suppose, for thinking about liberalism and not just in the sense, maybe it's worth saying, not just in the sense of, you know, liberal versus conservative in terms of electoral politics, but liberalism as a philosophy that has grounding in world processes.
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Pierre Lancer
Yeah, I think we're going to have to get to that definition pretty soon. Continue. How did you get from this kind of critical perspectives to contemporary arts?
- [05:17]
Nicholas Gamso
I mean, this field. I don't want to put too much stock in this particular field formation because also I was thinking with art history, visual culture studies, what we call cultural studies and literary studies, but it is attentive to the ways that art and aesthetics produces social and political Realities. So, I mean, I think, and I had always been very interested in space and geography and thinking about how art obtains in relationship to urban space. And I think a really pivotal moment for me in thinking about this was seeing Carol Walker's installation in 2014 in Brooklyn, which was this massive sphinx made out of sugar, which sat at the center of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, which is a neighborhood that has been completely transformed through private enterprise. It is one of the Ursites of gentrification in the United States. And I was struck by the idea that her work was thematizing not only the history of sugar in colonial modernity, but also the fact that racial capitalism lives on in the form of gentrification and in a sense, in visual culture and in the field of representation. The thing about the piece was that people went to it. Many people went to it, I think, expecting something that was somber and created a scene of dignity or even enlightenment. But in fact, it was a work that completely aggravated differences and underlying hostilities. And to me it was a commentary on the kind of false promises of liberalism. You know, it was about the idea that cross class and cross race encounters would produce a sense of, again, enlightenment or mutual good feeling. And it really blew up that sensibility. And it was funded by the developers of the site. So it was, you know, I think Walker was very conscious of all of this. So this kind of, you know, once I saw this as being a commentary on liberalism, I thought, well, this is actually kind of a small part of something that is, is much bigger and very prevalent in the arts.
- [07:35]
Pierre Lancer
Yeah, that's, that's, that's a beautiful introduction. As ever, I'll be able to put a link to an image of this work for listeners. And even though Kara Walker doesn't feature in your book, or at least she has escaped me, I think it's a beautiful way into thinking about the subject matter of the book. That relationship between art's public functions as they are performed by art instantiations in the public realm, usually with a weird mixture of institutional validation and private and public funding and whole history of representation, a whole history of social outreach and social utility. But in so doing, whenever art turns out in those kind of spaces, it is also somehow very weirdly self referential, self critical in a way that perhaps is hollow. I may be front loading quite a lot here with this question, but it would be good to start to unraveling some of those failures and some of those definitions the way that you do in the book. And before we nail them, maybe it Would be good to look at another example. You opened the book with a beautiful chapter. I say beautiful because actually, I was really taken in by a lot of your writing style and the way that you devote chapters to individual works or individual practices in a way that is kind of rare in scholarship of the format that I expected of this book. So you start by writing about a public installation called Monument the artist manaf Halbooni from 2017. This is a work that consists of three public buses. Is that what they are? That have been installed in the public square in Dresden in Germany. And they're installed sideways, so they're like three obelisks. And that's a work that, a little bit like Kara Walker's, points to many things happening at the same time. There's a history, there's a migrant crisis happening. But even more than Walker's work, it also solicits, elicits a lot of responses from the public that interacts with it. So I wonder if I could ask you to retell some of this story and some of the things you observe.
- [09:55]
Nicholas Gamso
Sure. And first, what I would say is that Walker's piece is very resonant in the American context and again, draws on the kind of history of the Americas and of colonial America. And I was curious to see other kinds of other sites, other points of convergence. I mean, the. The. This introduction is called Convergences, and this piece immediately struck me when I. I learned of it. Yes, it's three decommissioned city buses set on their ends, and they're in the middle of the main square in Dresden, where there's also the Frauenkirch. Is that right? The Church of Our lady, which has a history of its own and I think was built with money from kind of infantile financial capitalism in the 18th century. And the piece is meant to replicate three buses that are set that way in Aleppo, which was the Syrian city that was, you know, ravaged by aerial bombardment during the Syrian Civil War and was a site of a kind of proxy war, I suppose, between Russia and the West. And so there's a kind of colonial formation there as well. And the artist is half German and half Syrian, and he likes to think of these two sites as being of a piece because, of course, Dresden weathered the aerial war warfare at the end of World War II and was essentially leveled. This Church of Our lady was repaired after the war. So there's all of these themes of reclamation, repair, recovery, as well as ruination, loss that circulate around this object. And what is so interesting to me, and this is also. I Suppose how it builds on what I was saying a moment ago about Walker's work is that it conducts political conflict. It becomes a gathering point for different factions, including these, you know, neo fascist right wingers who have been holding marches in the square every Monday afternoon. And it also drew on what we think of as the traditional public sphere. I mean, I think the mayor of Dresden was there to cut a ribbon or somehow dedicate the statue. And interestingly, it's been. It showed as well in Berlin, and I think it's in Amsterdam now or was recently. And in those contexts, it loses some of its power. It loses some of its, let's say, agency as an object in space, because it is in a much more. Although it is in public space, it is in a much more institutional frame. It's not there to aggravate. It's not there to pose a challenge or to get in anyone's way. So I was interested in it as a political allegory, I suppose, but also as a real object in urban space that conducts urban movements, perambulations. And when I say movement, I'm also referring to social and political movements that seem to converge at this site. Yeah.
- [13:20]
Pierre Lancer
You mentioned the institutional framing of this artwork when it has traveled. And I think one of the first question that comes up in a book, and you address it throughout, is the relationship between the art object and its institution. So in a sense that we lose the context of Dresden, the bombed city, when we move an artwork like the monument to somewhere like Amsterdam, where it will have a different branding to it. That's only a thin metaphor for the fact that the institution already owns quite a lot of the discourse, owns quite a lot of the. The power of any work by the sheer act of commissioning it. Maybe I could ask you to. To try to enumerate some of the ways in which we should ask this. I mean, some of these things are incredibly obvious. You know, institutional critiques and legacies have. Have exploded over the last few years in as much as the art world seems to have completely turned against the institutions. But I have a feeling that that in a sense covers up for some of the more fundamental problems of art in its relationship to institutions when it comes to the. Delivering on the promise of liberalism.
- [14:39]
Nicholas Gamso
Yes. Well, I mean, I'm going to make the more conceptual statement first, which really just occurred to me, which is that institutions like. Institutions like museums and also I think universities share this, have the same. Require the same kind of legitimacy, popular legitimacy, as political institutions do. Yes. They are funded by often very nefarious financial trusts. But in order for them to have wherewithal, in order for them to have influence, in order for artists to want to show their work there, they have to have these kind of extra institutional components. And that does rely on creating or drawing on a public. So, you know, that's, that's to say that institutions can be, therefore, they are mutable and they can be reproduced in certain ways, and possibly they can be divorced from their financial entanglements. I mean, I suppose that's an open question and you're kind of implying in the way you. You have introduced this topic that, you know, that's not enough and that to. To run out a board member, we can talk about the controversy of the Whitney, which I discuss in my book. To run out a board member is just a mere token and that the institution's logics, the kind of ethos of the institution remains. And that's the thing that needs to be. To be challenged. So I don't know if I necessarily agree with that. I mean, I think, and forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, you know, I think it is significant that, that the boards of these institutions are being challenged because one of the things that contemporary art museums have done is privatize culture. And so they, they need those kinds of financial arrangements. And so to highlight those, most museum goers are not aware of those. They don't read the names of the donors. And the donors names are of course, disconnected from their. From their industries. So I think making visible those connections is quite important. And also once you do that, you can see that the institution might have something in common with other kinds of agencies. I'm thinking here of the way that, you know, so this group decolonized this place that I've worked with a little bit and talked to about this book or have thought about with your regard to this, this project. One of the things they've done is establish in I suppose, the public eye, connections between the boards of museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Modern Art and the US army and the IDF and the New York Police Department. And that's quite interesting because it does, you know, it does kind of challenge the idea that institutions are hermetically sealed or that. Or that the field of art is apolitical or that artists have no kind of agency in the world beyond museums and kind of the art world as we usually think of it.
- [17:56]
Pierre Lancer
Well, I think you've beautifully set up my next question, which is you've just discussed the failings and the way to maybe conceptualize and challenge some of the failings of liberal institutions such as museums and universities. Universities. But from then I think the follow up question must be what is it about the liberal in liberal institutions that might be contributing to these projects? And I think, you know, maybe 15 minutes into our conversation, it's, it's about time we actually gave a functional definition of liberalism and tried to discuss its either failings or its fading or rather maybe your project for reforming aspects of it. Let's start with a dictionary definition because I think for those of us who might not be living in liberal democracies, and particularly those who are not, you know, don't have the word liberal on one of the ballot boxes that might.
- [18:53]
Nicholas Gamso
Be, well, they are probably the ones who are most attuned to, you know, perhaps what it really means. I mean, it seems to me that liberalism, to give a somewhat reductive but useful definition that we can unpack. Liberalism is a kind of complex of ideas about freedom. And those can be, and of course freedom is a big word also worth unpacking. But some, some of those variations could be individual freedom, free markets, free speech and free expression, free mobility and movement. But of course, understanding or coming to terms with the idea of freedom requires coming to terms with its opposite. And how do you know you're free because someone else isn't free. And so we have these sites of unfreedom, like the prison house, and also authoritarian societies, you know, which are always bandied about in public discourse in the US and I think also in Europe as not only the enemy, but the constitutive outside of liberalism. And so we need to, you know, this was the justification for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to liberalize these societies because they, they don't have freedom and so on. And I think also just the extent to which poverty creates unfreedom, that is also a part of a liberal mindset because that is what sanctions sort of enterprise culture and you know, the liberty of contract. The idea that you can attain a kind of freedom or access to the world by, you know, working your ass off. I suppose, you know, that's, that's also part of this kind of nebulous concep of liberalism. And one, I mean, I think the way though that perhaps that's enough for now. But I suppose you did raise the question, you know, what is the relationship between liberalism and these institutions? Right. And I think one way of saying it is that the institutions are sites where this freedom can be enacted. Okay? So the institution is where you can that is, the museum is where you can put up any work of art, no matter how offensive, gratuitous, and so on. And it's there as evidence of the artist's freedom. And recently, I think some, let's say, theorists of the museum and its relationship to carceral culture have pointed out that it shares not only a period of historical emergence with the prison house, but also, again, is the opposite, you know, is the kind of conceptual alternative to the prison, in a sense. Right. The museum is where you put the things that you value, whereas the prison is where you put things that you discard and devalue and so on. So it actually serves a kind of elemental function, I think, for liberalism. And secondly, there's this question of what. This is a big topic, I suppose, in political theory. What underwrites liberalism. I mean, it's not just finance, it's also labor, which clearly has a relationship to financial capitalism. Who built the museums? Who maintains the museums? Who builds the public sphere and maintains them? Some places that answer is very easy. I mean, who built the US Capitol building? Enslaved people. Right. And in other cases, you have to do some work to sort of figure out what, what that relationship is. But I think that is really there too. There's always this dark side to, to liberalism. That is to say, there's always a kind of, there's, there's always a sourcing. There's always. And this is why liberalism arose as the kind of sunny side of colonialism. This is a oft repeated truism, but I think it, it makes sense in terms of this conversation.
- [22:40]
Pierre Lancer
Yeah, so the way you describe liberalism is almost irredeemable. All the, all the dark sides that you just alluded to seem to be completely built into the whole thing. Which kind of leads me to my next question, which again stems from the title of the book. Are we thinking about art in this context as a diagnostic tool for liberalism ills, or are we thinking about art as a corrective? And I think that makes quite a lot of difference in how we approach what it is that the art world has been doing to itself, both aesthetically and representationally. In as much as I think we can think, we can possibly quite easily see that the last 10 years of artistic production, particularly in the globalized art market and the globalized institutional sphere, has been a way to dangle solutions to some of liberal's failings. I mean, we maybe disagree a little bit about the effectiveness of some of these gestures, but I have a feeling that you might concur with me that the problems of liberalism won't be overcome just by expunging one board member after another or by protesting unfair working conditions for gallery and vigilators, that the problem might be slightly further. So I want to ask you a version of the chicken and egg question, essentially, and see where that takes us.
- [24:09]
Nicholas Gamso
Yes, well, it's a great question. I mean, maybe the way to respond is with an example. And I know that this is something you've thought a lot about and we did correspond a little bit about it, but the crisis or the scandal, I suppose, at the Whitney Museum. I have a chapter about, in this, in this book, about that, that event or, or that point of convergence. And in particular, I focus on the work of forensic architecture. Okay. And I think that it's that the work of this group, and I can sort of say what it's. What it's all about in a moment, but I think it does show both the kind of the diagnostic aspect that you're referring to. In other words, how do we see the failures, or as you say, the fadings of liberalism or the contradictions that are part of protest within a liberal society as well as producing alternatives or giving us a way out or doing a kind of reconstructive work?
- [25:15]
Pierre Lancer
Okay, well, maybe just to run through the beginnings of the controversies, the Whitney. This is something that has come up on the podcast a few times before, and I'll leave a link for listeners to the story so they can follow this if they so wish. But basically what happened is that one of the trustees of the Whitney, Warren, Candace, was revealed to be a major shareholder of an arms manufacturing, arms trading company implicated in a bunch of potential human rights abuses. This sparked protests by groups like the colonised space that you mentioned, but culminated with a presentation of a work by forensic architecture at the Whitney Biennial.
- [25:59]
Nicholas Gamso
Forensic architecture, which is of course a group of, yes, architects, I suppose, forensic scientists, other kinds of researchers, produced a film with Laura Poitras, who had made films about Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, in which they walked through the uses of this triple chaser tear gas in various sites. And the film is full of kind of high tech, dazzling imagery. There's aspects of the. I mean, it's, it's. In some spaces it's been sort of trashed as this spectacle of forensic research, which is very evident. You know, forensic research is used all the time in much less glamorous context, you know, and by lawyers and investigators and so on. So it's not exactly a novel idea. And one of the ironies of this work or contradictions, you could say, is that it was commissioned by the curators of the Biennial. And so the artists seemed, in a sense to be complicit. And not only were they collaborating with the museum, perhaps to gussy up its own skeletons in the financial closet, but there also seemed to be this capitulation or fealty to tech development. I mean, they used these research protocols developed by proprietary, but by tech companies, these softwares like, I think it's called Nvidia. And so they were in a sense, contributing to this proprietary software and so on. So that's an example maybe of, you know, those contradictions are a way of identifying the, as you say, the contradictions of protest within a liberal public sphere or protest in a museum space or politically engaged art within a museum space. At the same time, it was part of this larger kind of social movement that involved the boycotts and artists pull outs. And this eventually led to the sky being essentially forced to resign from the board of trustees. So there was an immediate outcome. And you could say, well, that's just one instance, you know, the story isn't over. And that's all true. But you could also say, well, there was a momentum there. And what's kind of more interesting to me, and this is really, I suppose, the answer to your question about what alternatives to liberalism are there, or how do we think beyond the liberal public sphere? This, this activity created a liberal, or, excuse me, created a kind of counter public of people who were not associated with the instit institution and who were not, Were not the public of the Whitney Biennial, which you could think of as being a more institutional kind of public. And so that, to me, that kind of reconstructive work is one way of answering your question. So this piece did diagnose the contradictions and dilemmas associated with liberalism, but it also showed you the way that alternatives can form outside of institutions. Indeed, there was a transnational component, you know, and this is one way that forensic architecture, you could say, aided in the protests. They did send people out into the field to, you know, as I say in the book, lean over and pick up disused tear gas, spent tear gas canisters, right? Including artists like Emily Jassier and organizations like Pet Salam, but other other kinds of people who are involved too. So there was. It was a popular effort that happened to have one foot inside the institution. And one could say that was, you know, in some ways that reflects the contradictions of doing socially engaged art or institutional critique. You could also say that this was intelligent because there was a foot in the institutional space. Right. You know, it's. It's simply one example out of many different kind of tactics.
- [29:59]
Pierre Lancer
I think what you've said is incredibly interesting. You've framed a couple of things in ways that I haven't quite considered. Before we move on, I want to give some explicit space to the way you define your project. Because I think even in the first chapter of the book, you suggest that once we have diagnosed some of the problems of liberalism, some of which might be irredeemable, you do find a very concrete space for art and artistic practice itself to perform within all this. And I'm going to quote a little bit, and this might be a little bit jarring out of context, but I think the language of. At least to give our listeners the kind of the flavor of the language that you use is quite important. So the way that you describe the mission of the art is to move towards a horizontal and popular agency in the arts. And that would be a shift away from the symbol and referent and towards the jumble of recalculated matter that comprises our world. Or put differently away from the representation and towards the phenomenology of relation. So I've already, in our conversation, I think we've used ideas representational a couple of times. Maybe I could ask you to talk a little bit about the more abstract, more theoretical ways in which you think this kind of liberal crisis is described. And it struck me throughout the book that one of the thinkers that you refer to the most, and you draw on quite heavily is Hannah Arendt. So how do these perspectives come together in your thinking about the current moment?
- [31:35]
Nicholas Gamso
Yes. Well, thank you. Hannah Arendt certainly is a pivotal figure in the book. In a sense, I'm ambivalent about her, given many of the things she said, especially later in her career. But she did give us a vocabulary for thinking about political phenomenology. And especially in the context of liberalism, where there's so much attention on kind of individual feats or on the representational dimensions of identity politics, which sometimes go nowhere. You know, as we know, this interest in phenomenology, in relation, in appearance, in action, seems to me to be very, very useful. I mean, it is a way of channeling our interests in direct action into a wider frame. Perhaps she says something that I I in her writings about the American Revolution, actually, which is, of course, a liberal or bourgeois revolution. Nevertheless, I think it's worth repeating. Seizing power is not about taking over institutions. It's about picking up power where it lies in the Streets. And that could mean picking up the cobblestone. You know, I mean, certainly it means that there is power in collaboration and that there is no such thing as power without working in concert with others. But it also points us to real matter, to infrastructures, to spaces and the built environment. This is a kind of infrastructure, but mobilities. Thinking about the supply chain crisis, for example, and this was really brought home to me by, by looking at the way that migrants have, for example, run through the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France, right, and the huge obstructions that that caused. And obviously since the beginning of the pandemic and with climate change as well, there's been a huge breakdown in the supply chain system and in other kinds of infrastructure that is central to capitalism. So there's very practical reasons why I'm interested in that. But I also think it just gets us away from the idea that art is politically significant because of who the artist is or what it shows, what it represents and more. What's really more interesting to me is how it conducts bodies in space or how it transforms the spaces where it is situated. And this is also one of the reasons, you know, in this book I'm, I'm for the most part talking about well known artists. And in some cases this is true of forensic architecture. It's true of Wolfgang Tillman's, it's, I suppose, true of other, other artists who I discuss. In some ways the celebrated nature of their work and Persona gets in the way. And so I try to step back from the kind of biographical readings and turn to what their works do to shape social and political interactions. It's not kind of an immediate answer to the failures of liberalism or to the crises of liberalism. It is also a way of diagnosing the challenges of doing political work in the context of a liberalism that absorbs protest and that sort of identifies actors and then turns them into institutional actors, in other words, identifies abolitionist actors and turns them into institutional actors. I think this is a way around that.
- [35:23]
Pierre Lancer
Yeah, that's, I think, the kind of crucial point. And I think it could be argued quite effortlessly that certain artistic practices are so easily co opted, their critique is so easily co opted into hegemonies that one, you know, one would be surprised not to have seen that coming at certain points. And you know, and it could well be argued that forensic architecture has already entered that status by the time it, it's anywhere near the Whitney.
- [35:52]
Nicholas Gamso
The one thing I would say is that, you know, the Palestinian question really is central to Eyal's work.
- [35:59]
Pierre Lancer
That's Eyal Wiseman, the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and to his thinking.
- [36:04]
Nicholas Gamso
And that's true for a lot of left wing Israeli academics. I don't think that he's an exception in that way. But given that the state of Israel is so often used or is so often presented as, you know, as a kind of rationale for state building, even though it is so transparently racist and colonial and problematic and so on, you know, that in and of itself is a useful critique of liberalism. So, you know, yes, there are certain actors who can become institutionalized, but, but I feel that certain discourses really resist institutional absorption. I mean, perhaps we disagree, but I.
- [36:42]
Pierre Lancer
Don'T know if I disagree. I wonder whether part of liberalism isn't to have the archetypal problem stay exactly where it is. I mean, it might play to liberal failing advantages or rather the neoliberal project before institutions while they still have some power to enact true liberal values as you described them earlier. For those energies to be wasted on some, on a game that's essentially rigged, that of course in no way invalidates any of the activism and the experiences of the people on the ground and the realities of the politics that has ensued for decades. But I wonder whether liberalism itself doesn't necessitate in the same way that you described the fact that the freedom requires an unfreedom. Whether it isn't almost inevitable. Maybe I'm just in a very, you know, maybe I'm having my teenage nihilist.
- [37:40]
Nicholas Gamso
No, I think that you make a good point. I think you make a good point. I just think it's important to, well, to. I don't know if I'm using the metaphor correctly. See the forest for the trees. In other words, yes, we can get hung up on institutional manifestations of liberalism or liberalism in popular culture or in the field of the fine arts. But at the end of the day, I suppose what matters most to me is questions of justice and people's lives, you know, and so I don't care if some, if an anti Zionist becomes a celebrity within the space of, of the arts. What's more interesting to me is sort of. Does he also aid in the project of anti Zionism simultaneously?
- [38:21]
Pierre Lancer
Well, I do actually have a follow up question to that because I think one of the things that we should be appending here is whether they make art and whether they make art that can be described as good in any possible sense. And I mean, maybe it was a slightly tired kind of category. Does the effectiveness, the impact of politically motivated artistic practices matter to its quality. But it does seem to me how quite often that question of aesthetics, aesthetics being another kind of bogeyman word, completely goes out of the question. And I think there we might possibly be dropping the ball a little bit. Because if the political activity that I don't disagree with you continues to be valuable, I don't care if Eyal achieves his political gains in one sphere or another that stands up to him. That is his politics. And kudos to him for pursuing his politics, using the resources that he has made available to himself. But I do care when the institutions of art and art itself, the aesthetic aspects of artistic practices, become impoverished because they have become locked into that battle of liberal institutions, which I wonder whether it isn't a losing game overall. Unfortunately, I lack the metaphor to go back to your earlier question of freedoms versus unfreedoms, but I think this could also be framed in a similar way. What is it that we're not seeing in the museum for us to be able to reproduce the conversation from the 24 hour news cycle on the question of Israel and Palestine?
- [40:11]
Nicholas Gamso
Well, I think I understand the question that you're posing and I've been asked it before regarding this book and other works. In other words, more of a comment, I suppose, that people. One person has said to me, you're talking about works that I don't want to look at. Right. And there's no beauty or kind of aesthetic merit to some of the works that you're talking about. I mean, I suppose in a way it's debatable. For me, the reason why I'm intrigued by these works is, yes, because they're interesting, which is obviously a catch all word, but one worth pausing over. I mean, they do animate my, my consciousness. They do make me think harder about what appears within the frame of the work, perhaps, and also what the artist might be drawing on or what, you know, what I as a viewer or others are experiencing. I find those questions intensely interesting. Is that aesthetic? I mean, it is, I suppose, a sensation. I have a thrill that I get from looking at some of the artworks. But I also do think, and this comes through maybe a little bit in the chapter on Tillman's and in some of the chapters, that kind of contest. You know, one thing we haven't talked about yet is that many of the artworks I'm looking at resist politics as such and don't want to be in a book called Art After Liberalism and don't want to be a part of this conversation and disdain Hannah Arendt and disdain the space of politics, the space of sovereignty, the space of worldliness, and so on. Right, so. And prefer, perhaps we could say, I mean, the theoretical frame might be the social, but prefer aesthetic enjoyment and pleasure as a mode of world building. And I think that that is. Is quite, quite important. And in fact, I just want to say that I think seeking out unalienated pleasure is one of the most important things that art activists can do and is one of the reasons for art activism is a kind of belief in the ability to create without being being used by institutions or having your. Your. Your capacities channeled into. Into capitalism or into the art world and its predatory manifestations.
- [42:34]
Pierre Lancer
Yeah, I think that's a nice silver lining that you just ended up on. And for me, the need for better functional definition of the word aesthetics and its many implications is becoming clearer and clearer. The cognition of a work like those made by forensic architecture, of course, is aesthetics. And by every understanding of that word, that doesn't mean that it should be excluded from that field.
- [43:01]
Nicholas Gamso
Yes, and if I may add something, aesthetics, this goes back to the question of relation rather than representation. Aesthetics become a kind of powerful force that an artwork can marshal. So sometimes you see something. This is the case with forensic architecture and other examples. Sometimes you see something that is visually striking or dazzling and it is used in the service of power. I mean, this is completely what post industrial capitalism, you know, the. The kind of logic of the spectacle that is that is employed or the uses of beauty in certain industries. You know, on the other hand, those forces can. Can be used to. To create or to. To induce political commitments, to attract a kind of counter public, to bring about a sharing or a kind of consciousness. So I think that aesthetics can. You know, one doesn't have to separate aesthetics and politics. I see the two realms as being very complementary in certain ways.
- [44:10]
Marshall Poe
Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just.
- [44:17]
Nicholas Gamso
$8 only at McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery, you find Vecna. We end this once and for all.
- [44:28]
Marshall Poe
Together on December 25th.
- [44:31]
Nicholas Gamso
We have a plan. It's a bit insane. Everyone in he knows where we are.
- [44:36]
Pierre Lancer
Watch out.
- [44:37]
Marshall Poe
Get ready for one last adventure.
- [44:41]
Pierre Lancer
We stay true to ourselves, stay true to our friends.
- [44:44]
Nicholas Gamso
No matter the cost. Found you.
- [44:49]
Marshall Poe
Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 2 begins December 25th only on Netflix.
- [44:55]
Pierre Lancer
Well, talking about the. The kind of easy application of the word aesthetics, let's move on to Your chapter about Volgan Tillmans, who. Yeah, I mean, I'm not being cheap here. He. He does make visually stunning work and has done for about 20 years, if not more. I'll put in links to a few key works for listeners, but just to maybe describe some of the things that Tillmans is known for. It's his portrait photography of kind of Berlin scene of the 80s and the 90s, usually young, pretty people wearing sportswear, lots of polyester, looking quite sexy, looking quite what I guess we would now call queer, even though I don't think he would have subscribed to those labels straight away. And Tillman's had quite a big presence in London over the last 20 years. And in particular, he came back to the fore in 2016 when he was one of the people spearheading campaigns for Britain to remain within the European Union, producing a whole bunch of posters with slogans like no man is an island. I mean, he. He did not succeed, which I think he bemoans in. In many interviews. But I really enjoy the way in which you try to bring his politics. And I'm going to posit that that Tillmans is not only an example of a liberal artist, but he's also an example of the perfect neoliberal artist in many senses. So the way you bring his aesthetic work and. Or rather the work itself, the work that doesn't explicitly say vote X or Y or, you know, fix this particular social problem with his politics proper.
- [46:35]
Nicholas Gamso
Yes, I think that it's a successful reading. And I. He certainly is. I mean, that is a case where. Yes, looking at his work, and in particular, the more didactic work associated with Brexit and. And some of his. I mean, he's a writer, too. A lot of his kind of political commentary, you know, is symptomatic of the contradictions of liberalism or of the kind of failures of liberalism or the challenges of being a politically engaged artist, but also being a celebrity, essentially, you know, and at the same time, I do think there's something. I mean, as you say, the work is visually stunning, but also it. It is attractive, you know, I mean, it is. It does do that work of drawing an audience together or conducting a group of spectators into a space. It thematizes bodies in motion. It gives us a kind of point or an anchor for the phenomenology of relation. It does this in a way, and often in counterpoint with liberalism. So one of the things I talk about. Maybe I should just spell it out a bit. A bit, yes. He has this series of posters that are around Brexit. And he was, you know, a champion of Remain. At other points, he's done these kind of travelogues, going, for example, to St. Petersburg. And also he spent a lot of time in Africa. He just had a show in Lagos where he appears to be a sort of emissary from the free west, showing the clean and sparkling image of the kind of queer success story and offers a hand to people who are in need. But what is so interesting to me about certain projects like that, in particular his work in St. Petersburg, is that it was a counterpoint to a show at the Hermitage Museum. And so it does exist in relation to his institutional validity. And he sort of took the opportunity to build those bridges with. With the people who he worked with. Yes, that is a kind of liberal gesture. I think he's conscious of his status as a major figure and someone who has been validated by institutions. Yes, yes. But again, what is most kind of interesting to me and compelling and perhaps recursive is the way that he thinks about materiality, infrastructure, mobilities, infrastructures. I mean, all of these images on airplanes, on trains and so on. He's really helping us to grapple with the idea of the world not just as a totality, but as something one can be embedded in. And I think that, you know, I feel strongly the desire to defend him, because while I share some of the ambivalence about his. Some of his political statements, I think it comes from a place of really wanting to engage with the world and to be a political actor and not to be kind of sheltered in his celebrity, as a lot of artists are and as a lot of people in politics certainly are. So I admire that worldliness, and it comes from a particular position and a sensibility that I think was learned through engaging in queer subculture. And that's kind of what I argue in the. In the book. And also he's showing us, you know, in political theory, there's this anxiety around the category of the social. Hannah Arendt, for example, has argued that social is the site of inaction. Right. It's a kind of sphere of. And she's talking in part about social reproduction, but also spaces of social life. And she's gotten chewed out by, you know, various feminist theorists, for example, because of that. And I agree with the critique. I mean, not her critique, in other words, the critique of.
- [50:36]
Pierre Lancer
Of.
- [50:37]
Nicholas Gamso
Of her work or of the. Of. Of politics. It has, if not encompass the sphere of the social as well. And I think he's showing us why that space can be, that is the space of the club, of the bar, of the festival of friendship. That can also be a space of meaningful political engagement. Especially when the public sphere is so rotten, you know, and when there's so few opportunities for doing meaningful political work in, in the spaces we think of as being political, in other words, electoral spaces, the media, the fourth estate, you know, So I think it's, it's really important. And the other thing I want to, is that there's a. Now this is maybe a liberal sentiment, but there is compassion in that interest in social life. And I do believe that there could be some degree, you know, some kind of coming together if that kind of recognition of people's basic needs for human interaction, desire to live in the world interaction, if that, if we attended to that, if we really thought about that, then we could build tremendous bridges across these huge political gulfs. And not in order to meet at the center, but to meet in another place. So one thing that I talk about in that chapter is this is of course the whole Brexit discussion is around this. How do you deal with liberal disenfranchisement on the right, you know, and a feeling that people, some people have on the right, including on the, you know, the radical right, that they have been disowned by, by liberalism, that they don't get anything out of liberalism, their world has shrunk, or that inequality has reduced them to a sort of semblance of a human being. And I think he is interested in that topic. And more to the point, I think he shows us that there are ways of interacting that can actually create solidarities. You know, and it's, it's a bit of a cliche to say, you know, have a basketball game and all of a sudden the, you know, these various factions will come together and you know, show teamwork and that sort of thing. But there is also something interesting to me just in terms of, you know, sort of outside of the liberal question, but in terms of how politics works, to think that that kind of collaboration can actually generate something interesting.
- [53:05]
Pierre Lancer
I am going to challenge you a little bit on some of this reading because one of the notes that I took when I was reading a chapter, and maybe this is something I already thought about, Tillmans and artists like him is that while they make a good case for liberal values, and Telmans has been very explicit, you cite him saying that should Brexit. Go ahead. It would validate the hatred of anti liberal sentiments. So essentially, if Britain voted to leave, that would mean that we have been taken over by people who are just utterly unacceptable and vile. And that's something that I took issue with straight away because the liberals contempt for anti liberal sentiment. I think it's incredibly counterproductive for a couple of reasons. There's also another moment where that you cite and Tillmans is just showing himself to be completely incapable of understanding of the realities of the lives of in this particular conversation that you cite of him with a politician from Lower Saxony, Telmuth just kind of is incredulous to the idea that the Royal Pool in Germany would be alienated. And there are a couple of things to think about. You already mentioned the idea that there might have been disenfranchised this new right or this kind of crusty right, whichever we ascribed it. These are people who are disenfranchised from liberalism. They've forgotten how good liberalism would have been for them. And here my question to Tillmans, maybe to you is, well, how effective then is the work that Tillmans is producing at convincing those left behind that liberalism is good for them? And two, actually, is it not feasible that there are other ways of organizing one's attitudes to freedoms in ways other than those liberal ones? And of course it's a kind of very quick talking point to start descending into conversations about the undesirability of racism, homophobia, et cetera, as again you cite Tillman's doing. And I'm nowhere near suggesting that we should be say, tolerant of those kind of views at a level of organizing society. But I think the dismissal of the liberal artist and the liberal critic of all alternatives, of all suggestions for reforming aspects of liberalism as automatically undesirable because of those kind of deep right wing essentially fascist qualities, I think is actually super counterproductive to the project of maintaining and adapting and re evaluating the liberal values themselves. So in a sense, like the first line of critique is always, oh, but look, you know, Thomas has it so good. He's, he's jetting off between one plane or another and he becomes ambassador to, for neoliberalism in Lagos. And that's kind of shallow, you know, good for him. But the second question is just how good is he at convincing his audiences, those that are not already on his side and equally therefore privileged that what he's proposing is going to be functional and how does it actually ideologically work with their conceptions? How much space does liberalism, the, the, you know, the idea of freedom of belief, freedom of conviction, how encompassing is it of, of that kind of dissent?
- [56:42]
Nicholas Gamso
Well, I, I agree with the premise of Your. Of your question. In other words, I agree that his political statements are ineffectual, in a sense, and that the people who he could potentially be reaching out to are not there or they won't receive those statements. The only people who are paying attention to those or to what he's saying are either in his camp or sympathetic to his camp or perhaps apolitical, and are interested in his work because it has, you know, pictures of sexy boys in it and that kind of thing. Right. And so.
- [57:13]
Pierre Lancer
Nothing wrong with that.
- [57:15]
Nicholas Gamso
No, I mean, that's why I like his work, you know, and in fact, my. My interest. You go, this is.
- [57:20]
Pierre Lancer
This is. This is all I need for the tailor. You like his work because of the pretty boys. Good.
- [57:24]
Nicholas Gamso
Well, yeah, but, you know, when I first. My first encounters with his work were ambivalent because I felt that they were such. It was such a scene, you know, it was like his. And now I'm contradicting maybe some of the things I. The book. But his exhibitions show. In fact, if you go see them and you pay attention to the crowd there, they reveal all of the hierarchies that you see in queer life. And I can't blame him for that. Exactly. I mean, that's part of the art world too, I suppose, is that those hierarchies exist or they overlap in some sense with other kinds of, let's say, subcultures, and certainly queer and gay subcultures in particular. So I think that that is there, and those are some of the reasons why I find his work quite interesting. And it should also be added that he does a lot of work that is basically outside of gallery spaces and that you might encounter in a magazine or something. And so they do have other kinds of. They allow for other kinds of interface. But this is why I think that we need to kind of reduce the figure, reduce the celebrity. It's hard with him because, of course, he is this kind of, you know, delightful figure. People enjoy, I suppose, interacting with him and having him serve on juries and, you know, he's a frequent kind of guest speaker at museums and institutions.
- [58:42]
Pierre Lancer
He.
- [58:43]
Nicholas Gamso
He also. His work, I think, is, as I say in the. In the chapter. In some ways it is very much continuous, even though he. He does not really do. You know, he doesn't do commercial fashion photography, but his work is published in certain commercial magazines. And it's very much continuous with the aesthetic sensibilities of, as you say, neoliberalism. Some of his work is. I should say. So, yes, that's all there that's all true. And I agree that maybe this is a sort of separate point, but you mention it, I mean, I agree that there needs to be attention paid to the anxieties of people who have been dispossessed by liberalism. I absolutely agree. You know, I often think about, but this, the woman who was killed on January 6th during the insurrection at the US Capitol. She was a schoolteacher or something. She had been completely brainwashed by listening to right wing radio. She was confused. And she made a video of herself on her way to Washington D.C. for this event. And in it she said, I can no longer be a bystander. I can no longer be a bystander. And that really struck me in part because Hannah Arendt has said the exact same thing about her own political becoming. She realized at a certain point in her. She could no longer be a bystander. Now she was not confused about what she needed to pay attention to at that moment in her life, certainly. But that desire to live in the world, that desire to participate in, in, in action, in making decisions, in being, having the capacity to judge and with others, judge, make decisions and, and move, I suppose, you know, that is a very real and a very important part of human experience. You know, and I don't want to speak in too universalizing of terms, but that is the basis for politics is the desire to get involved in a real way. And I think that Tillman shares that desire and I think his work impels that feeling. I mean it not only does it show, but it participates, I suppose, in these kind of world making and world forming events and scenes. And I know people, this is anecdotal, but I know people who were very kind of right wing or sympathetic to the right. And then they came out of the closet and it turns out that they, they didn't really have those sentiments. They just, you know, wanted to be part of something. Right. So I think that there's, I'm speaking in somewhat abstract terms here and I don't mean to dismiss obviously the critiques of the right. I mean, it's horrifying. It's utterly horrifying. But I think at the same time one has to pay attention to people who feel left out. I mean, that is so important and not to, you know, so much of the, what passes for inclusion in liberal institutions is just absolutely paltry and in some ways condescending. And this is a big problem with social practice. Something we can talk about maybe a little bit later. But does that make sense? Does that answer your question?
- [61:38]
Pierre Lancer
It makes Sense, I was laughing slightly because I, I have quite fundamental disagreements with, with some, some of your attitudes and I don't particularly want record and make it sound like I have any defenses of any of the particularities of political demagoguery that you might have alluded to. But I think one of the biggest problems of liberalism, and I already mentioned this in my last question, is its contempt for illiberalism. So the fact that we automatically frame anyone who might be straying towards the right, homophobic as this kind of Persona non grata until they happen to, as you were just saying, you know, come out of a closet and, and make themselves appear like a good liberal. We don't need to look far but the front pages of the New York Times before we figure out that actually, that the liberal left, or in fact the, the centrist and the general liberalism has its own clubs for belonging. And those clubs continue to be reinvented and they are more often than not determined by exactly the same extractive forces. The question of gender, which is not going to go away anytime soon, which is a flip side of the coming out of the closet that you were talking about, is showing itself to be significantly ideologically motivated. There is an element of brainwashing in half of these conversations without necessarily even wanting to point a finger at anything in particular. But you know, I think I've done it now. I think each, both, both the left and the right have pathologies exactly, exactly like that. And Art's position, Art's position within all of that continues to be, to be for crabs and all of that.
- [63:30]
Nicholas Gamso
Yes, I mean, I completely agree with you. And this is both one of the challenges of, of anti liberalism and one of the, of anti liberalism. I mean, what is going to go in the place of this kind of middling liberalism that you have correctly, I think, identified with the New York Times? You know, to me that is another kind of withdrawal from the world. You know, that the people who write most of the columnists, I think for the New York Times and certainly their editorial board, you know, they do not live in the world necessarily. They live in a sphere of elite culture. And I don't say that to kind of repeat the talking points of right wingers because my, my sense is that the quality of their elitism is a bit different. I don't necessarily see them as being cultural elites, exactly whatever that could mean, but simply as being, you know, wealthy people who lived in extremely privileged environments all of their lives and have never really had to have engagements with, not just right wing poor People, but left wing poor people, you know, and so there is a kind of, of anti worldliness that I think is part of what they do. And that's a part of neoliberalism too. I mean, the whole destruction of, now I'm using a term maybe to mean a couple of different things, but the, the destruction of certain kinds of public life, you know, the privatization of public education, for example, that is an anti worldliness that I see as being endemic to neoliberalism. And I also do agree with you that the left falls victim to the same kind of confusion or people on the left, certain people on the left fall victim to this. Some of it has to do with the kind of media ecosystem that we live with, which is also one that is completely privatized. And you know, I think there are questions about whether what it means to have a shared reality. And I'm, you know, as you might, as you can perhaps tell from reading the book, I'm hesitant to use that kind of language because whoever determines that shared reality tends to have a kind of interest. And so the ideological issues, they're there. But I don't want to necessarily privilege any one point of view. I view the idea of after liberalism as being an open one. My own sentiments lie with the kind of abolitionist project, and I do say that sort of later in the book, but I recognize that there is a degree of radical openness and instability that comes with the loss of a dominant regime. Absolutely.
- [66:08]
Pierre Lancer
Well, I think we're in a very good place actually now then, even if we don't necessarily agree as to what is the most likely outcome of this current moment, I think I can count on you in whatever the next revolution is, at least to understand, at least to wave the flag for a radical reform of liberalism. I'm slightly joking here, but we've corresponded a little bit. In as much as the question of what comes after liberalism seems to be at the moment being answered in the media with the, with the words post liberalism, which of course doesn't actually mean we're figuring it out. It's a term that has already had defined meaning in the 1980s and sort of harts back to a certain type of Thatcherism and Reagan politics, which you know, maybe is something that we might get to see a cosplay of in UK politics in the near future. We definitely have of the liberal institutions preparing themselves for that onslaught. But I want to use our final minutes to actually get back to the book a little bit. We've done this kind of what happens next in the world, but I don't think we've covered quite a lot of the world yet. I was struck, and we've already alluded to this, I was struck by how Eurocentric some of your case studies are. And that's interesting in itself. It's interesting how maybe the American artwork doesn't produce nearly as many examples of obvious kind of friction moment. Even though of course the forensic architecture affair took place in New York. But you know, it's a.
- [67:52]
Nicholas Gamso
An international affair, British.
- [67:55]
Pierre Lancer
But I want to. I want to. To turn towards China, as you do in one of your chapters, when you look at the career, short career of the artist Ren Hang, who I guess aesthetically isn't a million miles away from some other thing that Wolfgang Tillman's does, but context in which this practice, which is sometimes kind of body oriented, documentary, sometimes it's to do with fashion, sometimes it's to do with sexuality. Some of the framing is incredibly interesting. But how that practice being rooted in China actually doesn't do very much within China, but is a fantastic export. But Rang Hang essentially is recognized abroad for his liberal values, for the fact that his works represents some kind of reaffirmation of these values and ideas that we have been discussing.
- [68:48]
Nicholas Gamso
I suppose so many of these examples of course, take place within liberal society, with liberal governments and freedom of the press, at least putatively. So I thought it would be important to look at examples from elsewhere. And I had been thinking about his work for a long time, in part because of the way it's essentially been marketed to American audiences as this sort of glib and ironic work that yes, is queer or sort of engages in queer body politics, but. But also is using the sort of visual rhetoric perhaps that we associate with. It's not so much with sort of the socialist imagery that exists in China, but the ideas of Beijing as being this site of kind of mimetic architectural space. And I just thought that the works, sometimes you see things that seem so marketed to you, as it were, or are so perfect in their distillation of varying assumptions of aesthetics in different environments. And I was also curious, and remain curious about just what happens to an artwork when it moves between different kinds of environments. And we've talked about that a little bit with other examples like Manaf Halbuni's buses at the beginning of this conversation. But here it's like this work, work that is perhaps. I mean, it is controversial in the sense that it was certain works of Ren's were taken down when they were on view in Beijing. A work that is controversial in an environment like that can come into the space of the free West. And, you know, for me, it's not that it kind of lights up when it gets here, it's that all of its political potential is drained and it becomes pure gloss. And the sort of fashiony, seamless imagery that he uses just becomes another part of this kind of continuity of design, publishing, fashion, photography that is ubiquitous in the American and European medias.
- [71:05]
Pierre Lancer
One of the things that's come to my mind as we've been talking is the relationship between liberalism and capitalism and the reliance on one and the other. And I wonder if this is not maybe the simplest thing to observe in the world, but in as much as we have observed many times that capitalism does not really thrive on democracy all that much that is completely agnostic when it comes to the state formation. A similar question posed to liberalism and neoliberalism itself is even more interesting. And I think the Chinese example is maybe a good case study here, because you describe Ren Hang as someone who's doing work that is reflecting on the limits of the freedoms that his society is in. He's even in this interesting position where he keeps his career hidden from his family while already being internationally renowned for what he does. So in a sense, I'm trying to figure out where. Where it is that liberalism has already seeped into Chinese society and whether, if we agree that liberalism is not a feature of Chinese society, whether neoliberalism indeed is in as much as the work can circulate. And of course, you know, it would be. Would be naive to think that liberalism and neoliberalism are the same thing. In, you know, standard definitions, we think that neoliberalism is the kind of. Of renewed economic project of liberalism. But actually, maybe it isn't. And maybe the question which is going back to a previous moment, maybe the question of what happens next is to do a lot more to do with capital as opposed to liberalism. So in that kind of sense of imposing values on the rest of the world, does the US to the Western allies have any hope of bringing liberalism to China? But then what do we do about the fact that capitalism no longer relies on that? And we do have kind of the odd artist, the odd cultural artifact traversing the boundary, telling us that there is a disjunction. In that case, art really does have. Culture has a really, really special place in being able to really remind us that these systems are not compatible beyond the one thing that actually oppresses us all. And the one thing that we could probably all agree on. We more or less unhappy with is capitalism.
- [73:42]
Nicholas Gamso
What your question makes me think of is just the zeal for capitalism in the Chinese art market in the 1990s and 2000s and the end of the 1980s too. And this is something that Chinese artists were, of course, aware of. And Chinese artists travel, you know, and live in the west. And many students at that art schools where I've worked in the United States are, you know, are from Chinese cities. And certainly that's true of architects as well. What to make of that? I mean, one could say values and cultural politics defy some of the kind of overarching economic divisions that we, that we see or that we tend to talk about. And there is more cross pollination than one might think. Of course, like in the west, most of the people who are able to travel in those ways, to move between these spaces, have a kind of privilege. And so in a way, the structural components match one another across, you know, across borders. I'm somewhat at a loss about, you know, where that puts liberalism with, in relation to Chinese society and, and how that squares or doesn't with the kind of geopolitical questions of this new cold war that seems to be appearing between the west and China. I don't think it's. This might be an instance where culture, that is to say, fine arts, films, you know, music, has to perform its liberalism only up to a point, and some of the underlying structural dynamics will remain the way they are or, or the, the more politically oriented kind of elements of, of public life, like the press, you know, those things take the brunt of new enclosures, I.e. political enclosures rather than economic ones. And then again, culture is denuded and starts to lack the edge that it might have under other conditions. You know, I feel remiss talking about this and kind of trying to make predictions, except to say that this might be one of the instances where we see the kind of limits of art as a political object, or we see the way it remains tethered to political economy as it exists. You know, and this is sort of the art as merely culture. Do you know what I mean by that?
- [76:20]
Pierre Lancer
Yeah, no, I think, I think those limits are incredibly interesting and I'm completely speculating alongside with you. I mean, just to, just to think about a couple of examples. I mean, I know that certain types of cultural exports that go from the west to China are both treated with extreme, extreme freedom. And there is a massive appetite by Chinese society for, for culture. So, you know, I know someone who produces contemporary Downs and the moment, the moment you need half a million dollars in the bank for, for the next two years, you go on a tour in China and like it's, it's all, all perfectly done, but as a, and, and the politics, you know, of course this, this work is political here, but it's not censored when it comes to China. It's not seen as political when it arrives in China.
- [77:06]
Nicholas Gamso
Right, exactly.
- [77:07]
Pierre Lancer
And conversely, I've, I've for a long time wondered whether certain Chinese dissidents, AI Weiwei being the prime examples, are so much of a threat to the Chinese regime, whether the liberalism of the practice of someone like AI Weiwei's even registers. Because to be a little bit morbid about it, if the Chinese state thought that AI Weiwei was a threat to their politics, they would have silenced him successfully. They had the means to do that, yet they chose not to. So, you know, we, we have plenty of examples I think to, of, of where these limits are, are quite hard and, and art.
- [77:46]
Nicholas Gamso
Yes.
- [77:46]
Pierre Lancer
Doesn't produce a politics.
- [77:48]
Nicholas Gamso
Yes, I agree with you and I, I very much take your point and agree with your point about in, in a politicized society that is, in a society that emphasizes the normative aspects of politics, public demonstrations, you know, party loyalty, the kind of that sense, these cultural objects, I mean they, they represent. One of the things I talk about with Wren's work is that it does represent a kind of descent from that, you know, it's, it's minor in a sense. It represents a descent from that. Yes. Normative or state level or party level kind of politics. Yes, but at the same time, you, you do really see the difference between culture and politics in those environments, whereas in the United States where there's. So we live in a very anti political society in many ways. I mean, I think that's changing. That is what the reason why I'm the book is, because I think that is changing and people are becoming politicized for better or worse. But in this environment, people look to culture for moral and political ideas. And so I think that is one kind of thing that I take from your comment. But it's also really worth saying that we are living in this period of economic shocks, of breakdown, of unevenly distributed fits and starts. And so that is already changing geopolitics. And it is a big question mark. I mean, this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to predict what will come after liberalism as the dominant global political and economic regime, because we can't predict exactly the future of US China relations because so much of it depends on trade and on other kinds of relationships that are themselves dependent on. On ecologies, on the availability of resources, on the availability of labor. I mean, this is. So this is the story that we're living with now. And so, yes, that is what makes it a particularly interesting topic. But it becomes very, very challenging. And not just to us as essentially outsiders to the political world, but also to people who are, you know, to our heads of state. They really don't know and their advisors don't know. So it's an interesting moment, certainly, with regard to those things. If I could say one other thing, but your references to the idea of the return to traditional or pre secular kinds of movements. I think you really strongly see that in the arts in terms of a kind of return to craft, in terms of certain presentations of decolonial thinking. I don't know if you went to Venice this year, but. But it is full of. So you saw. I mean, it was an exhibit that was full of anti modernist, anti secular works. I can't say whether their presentation was successful because I. My sense is that most of the audience members, you know, did not understand the cosmologies that they were presenting and understood the works as being purely aesthetic or being even kind of diagrammatic in a sense. I mean, some of the works that were chosen were chosen clearly, you know, because they can be photographed and circulated on social media. So to me, that is one of the kind of main threads. And it's interesting that they would also almost imply that decolonization was, you know, sort of invented on the psychiatrist's couch while Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington were sitting there, you know, really fascinating kind of.
- [81:20]
Pierre Lancer
Of.
- [81:20]
Nicholas Gamso
And strange route through art history to get to the present moment. But to me, that was a really demonstrative example of the turn away from liberalism within the sphere of representation, essentially.
- [81:36]
Pierre Lancer
Yeah, that's a very, very good read. I mean, my impression of Venice was that it was completely devoid of politics, but I was completely inspired by the attention to aesthetic aspects of the work.
- [81:48]
Nicholas Gamso
It's an interesting case, you know, and I'm not crazy about social practice. I'm not crazy about socially engaged art as a genre. And I. I hope that comes through in some of the chapters of my book. In a way, I think those can be interesting. And certainly they create more problems than they. At times, they create more problems than they solve. But there is also a kind of space within representation or within the more traditional plastic arts. And yes, within craft, which of course has a practical dimension, but where some of these things are being worked out or there's an attempt to think about some of these issues that we've raised around politics.
- [82:27]
Pierre Lancer
Thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you for joining.
- [82:29]
Nicholas Gamso
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
- [82:42]
Pierre Lancer
Art After Liberalism by Nicholas Gamsol is published by Columbia University Press. I'm Pierre Lancer and J. Roy's Marshall Poe. Thanks for listening and join us next time.
- [83:07]
Nicholas Gamso
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Pierre Lancer
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Nicholas Gamso
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Nicholas Gamso
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